Family genealogy
3- In Uncle Mechele's family, one son survived: Haim/Heniek Landschaft
and a little girl, Sabina Checinski.
This book, in English, describes the lives of Sabina's grandparents during her youth, as well as those of her family.
Her mother died in 1929, she had just turned 4 years old.
Then war broke out, with its share of pain and destruction.
In September 1942, her entire family was sent to Treblinka. A kind gaze, that of Rafal Kowalski, watched over her and her uncle Henri.
From November 1942 until the Liberation, they were hidden in the Jedrzejow region, within a radius of about thirty kilometers.
At the Liberation, some Poles, who had seized the property of Henri's parents, refused to return anything.
Henri eventually joined the small group of surviving cousins in Munich. Sabina remained in Poland and married Rafal.
Sabina wrote a book of her memoirs.
At the age of seventeen, she was saved by the protection of Polish friends, including Rafal Kalowski, whom she married after the war. He transformed her into a young Catholic girl, providing her with a baptismal certificate and false identity papers. She lightened her hair and learned religious prayers and hymns. He found her numerous hiding places over two years, including among former students. He was a schoolteacher. She recounts her epic journey in this book, published in 2012.
Rafal took it upon himself to hide the uncle and niece separately, taking turns staying with friends and acquaintances in various villages in the region. Since the hunt for Jews was still ongoing, they often had to move to avoid arousing suspicion. For two and a half years, they encountered Poles who helped them and others ready to denounce them in any way.
Henry had inherited an Aryan physique and was able to hide, in the company of his niece Sabina, the daughter of his older sister, who died in 1929.
After the liquidation of the Jedrzejow ghetto on September 20, 1942, they were "lucky" enough to escape deportation.
Henri, like my father, had helplessly witnessed his family's departure... for Treblinka. His mother only had time to give him his ring before he was selected to continue earthworks, with a view to improving the city's railway line.
As elsewhere, the Nazis had selected about a hundred Jews to liquidate the ghetto.
They created a small ghetto to confine them.
Rafal managed to extract Henri from the small ghetto where he was located.
In late October 1942, when the first rumors of its liquidation began to circulate, Rafal did everything he could to help it. He managed to obtain false papers for it and found it a hiding place about twenty kilometers from Jedrzejow.
Despite false papers and a well-rehearsed legend, he came close to disaster more than once.
Henri and a Polish partisan were denounced for political reasons to the Polish police, who were collaborating with the Gestapo. Henri was transferred to a prison in Krakow. Rafal got him a lawyer, and through an unforeseen series of events (in the surrounding chaos, he was mistaken for someone else), he was released.
The Russians entered the town of Opatowiec where they were hiding in February 1945. But they waited three weeks to reach Jedrezjow.
Their return was not easy.
They decided to enter the city discreetly, almost hiding, until they reached the house of true friends. The next day, they contacted the Poles who had seized their families' property, including Henri's father's house and business, through German requisitions.
The Poles, whom they knew before the war, with the local police as witnesses, refused to return the house, furniture and utensils, and even the clothes.
The Russian commander of the place was ready to intervene against the various misdeeds of these Poles, including sending them to Siberia if Henry filed a complaint and testified.
But Henri did not want such an action to be perceived as a desire for revenge.
He left Jedrzejow and travelled through several cities in search of work and integration.
Meanwhile, Sabina stayed with her friends, rarely going out for fear of being attacked. None of her own father's friends, to whom he had entrusted his fabric stash, wanted to return it to Sabina.
Some people found it hard to believe that she had survived.
Faced with hostility, she decided to join one of the only people who had shown her the most sympathy: Rafal Kalowski .
He lived in Rychwal (near Warsaw and 300 km from Jedrzejow). She stayed there for three weeks, because Rafal, due to school reorganization, ended up being transferred to Wroclaw (Breslau) at the end of 1945.
Henri also settled in this city for a while.
A few months later, they were joined by other surviving cousins: Aron Maier, Perla Fajgenblatt-Frucht and my father.
They all then met up in Munich.
But Sabina stayed in Poland with Rafal and had a child, Thomas.
She left Poland in 1969 for Denmark, without Rafal, who was too old.
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